As we enter a new era of politics, we hope to see that Obama has the courage to fight the policies that Progressives hate. Will he have the fortitude to turn the economic future of America to help the working man? Or will he turn out to be just a pawn of big money, as he seems to be right now.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Some time back, this column opined that many Democrats feared thatnominating Sen. Hillary Clinton for the presidency risked setting off anational psychodrama that could cost their party the election. Both as awoman and a Clinton, she is hated on the right with near-psychoticintensity. That said, it’s clear that the 2008 general election campaignwill be brutal regardless of whether Democratic primary voters chooseher or Sen. Barack Obama. The way things shape up, Republicans will havealmost no choice but to vilify the Democratic nominee. With the wreckageof the Bush administration at its collective feet, the GOP has nocandidate acceptable to all of its factions. Talk radio blow hards RushLimbaugh and Sean Hannity, for example, spent the week previous to theSouth Carolina primary warning that nominating either Sen. John McCainor former Gov. Mike Huckabee would be to destroy the party. McCain andHuckabee finished onetwo, although it’s worth noticing that McCain took33 percent of the vote vs. 42 percent when he lost South Carolina toGeorge W. Bush in 2000. Had Huckabee and Grampa Fred Thompson not splitthe Grand Ole Opry vote, McCain might have come in second. Overall, hereceived approximately 80,000 fewer votes than eight years ago. That’s abad omen for November.

That’s why Clinton and Obama were so wise to walk back the burgeoningracial controversy that threatened to divide Democrats just previous tothe Nevada caucuses.

“Neither race nor gender should be a part of this campaign,” Clintonsaid during the Las Vegas debate. Obama affirmed that neither she norBill Clinton had racist motives and warned against “falling into thesame traps of division that we have in the past.... Dr. [Martin Luther]King [Jr.] stood for that. I hope that my campaign has inspired thatsame sense, that there’s much more that we hold in common than whatseparates us.” It’s mystifying that Obama let the controversy go as faras it did. Bad-faith allegations of racism such as were made againstClinton for mentioning former President Lyndon Johnson’s role in helpingbring King’s dreams to fruition only damage Democrats generally. As theconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out, false charges ofbias leave a bitter aftertaste—bitter enough, sometimes, to induceotherwise sensible people to vote against their own self-interest.

The last thing Obama’s campaign needed was to make him a “black”candidate in the ethnic or sectarian sense. Amplified by TV networkseager to exploit hot-button controversies to build ratings, thekerfuffle over King’s legacy threatened to do exactly that. Maybe it’s apipe dream to imagine that Democrats can transcend identity politics,but it’s also central to who they are.

But that doesn’t mean sharp arguments are out of bounds. Which brings usto the latest Obama-Clinton controversy regarding how Democrats shouldtalk about former President Ronald Reagan, himself a veritable saint toRepublicans. OK, that’s an exaggeration. Today’s GOP candidates invokeReagan mainly to avoid saying “George W. Bush.” Obama started it bycomparing former President Clinton unfavorably to Reagan.

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way thatRichard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” he saidin Nevada. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because thecountry was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excessesof the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but therewasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. Ithink people—he just tapped into what people were already feeling, whichwas we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense ofdynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Now if HillaryClinton’s campaign wanted to get nasty, it might have wondered aloudwhich Ronald Reagan Obama admired, the one who opened his 1980 electioncampaign in Philadelphia, Miss. —the scene of infamous civil rightsmurders during the 1960 s—talking about “states rights’,” the one whotalked about “welfare queens” in Cadillacs or the one who sold guidedmissiles to Iran. Instead, Bill Clinton forcefully defended hisadministration’s economic record against both Reagan and the currentpresident, pointing out that Reaganism started working Americans on thedownward-running escalator that Bush’s policies have only speeded up. Heeven got a little red in the face, which the high school hall monitorson CNN, MSNBC and the rest found upsetting. So did Obama, who wonderedaloud in the South Carolina debate about which Clinton was his opponent.It’s beginning to look like a pattern. Obama says something provocative,then complains about being misrepresented or double-teamed. Inbasketball, to continue a metaphor that Obama, an enthusiastic pick-upplayer, would certainly recognize, it’s called “working the refs.”Players do it when they’re losing.

—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author andrecipient of the National Magazine Award.

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About Me

I enjoy photography and cats, and the people who enjoy photography and cats. Politics has become a second or third interest now that Tom Delay is going to jail and the GopPigS have lost the Congress. Even with the other big-business party, the Democrats, shape-shifting and pretending to stop the war, politics is a swamp that one should avoid.

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INFP - "Questor" says this about AJ: High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.